A TIMELY Saturday Night Live Skit. “Do you think Harry Reid was watching SNL last night? Obviously the writers concocted this sketch before anyone knew about Reid’s remarks in the Halperin/Heileman book being released tomorrow, but they couldn’t have timed this any better if they had tried. I imagine that Lorne Michael’s staff was doing some high-fives when the news broke yesterday, knowing this was running after the football game:”

MICHAEL S. MALONE: Got $2 billion to spare if it has a chance to turn around the economy?

THE PERILS OF turning civilization into software.

IN THE MIDST OF A DEEP FREEZE, the British Met Office insists it’s a warm winter:

A period of humility and even silence would be particularly welcome from the Met Office, our leading institutional advocate of the perils of man-made global warming, which had promised a “barbecue summer” in 2009 and one of the “warmest winters on record”. In fact, the Met still asserts we are in the midst of an unusually warm winter — as one of its staffers sniffily protested in an internet posting to a newspaper last week: “This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded. For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average. As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings.”

Well, that’s certainly going to enhance their credibility.

STEPHEN GREEN: The Week In Blogs: Bobo Fetish & Mall Cop Comes to DHS.

SCOTT OTT: The key to GOP victory lies in the local GOP committeeperson.

DARN: Boston Consulting Group says car battery costs will not fall far enough in the next 10 years to allow a massive shift toward electric vehicles.

JOHN EDWARDS’ CHICKENS, coming home to roost.

MICKEY KAUS: We Remember Jim Johnson!

IN THE MAIL: From Dr. Roberta Lee, The SuperStress Solution.

MICHAEL STEELE: Reid should step down from leadership role for ‘Negro’ remark.

“I think he should, if the standard is the one set by [Trent Lott],” Steele said on “Fox News Sunday” when asked if Reid should resign his post. Trent Lott resigned his post as Majority Leader in 2002 after praising Strom Thurmond’s 1948 presidential candidacy during a birthday celebration for the 100-year-old South Carolinian.

Mark Halperin and John Heliemann report in their new book, “Game Change,” that Reid said during the campaign he thought Obama could win because, while black, he was “light-skinned” and lacked a “Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

Interesting. Related item here.

ANN ALTHOUSE ON HARRY REID ON BARACK OBAMA: “Can we infer that they were pretty much all saying that?”

Plus, from the comments: “If this is what they say about Obama behind his back I can only imagine how they talk about gay people.”

UPDATE: Hmm. Remember when Reid disparaged Clarence Thomas’s language skills? More on that here. “We suppose Reid will find some staff knucklehead to take the fall for this appallingly shoddy research, but the question remains: Why is the Democratic leader of the U.S. Senate so intent on insulting the intelligence of Clarence Thomas, the only black member of the Supreme Court?” While demonstrating that he himself hasn’t actually read anything relevant? Yep, Reid is an inspirational figure, proof that one needs neither personal appeal nor political skill to rise to Senate Majority Leader.

IT’S HARD TO TAKE CONOR FRIEDERSDORF’S CRITIQUE OF LAZINESS SERIOUSLY WHEN HE SAYS THIS: “I’m not sure if traffic is up at Instapundit these days or down.” And when, you know, there’s a sitemeter that answers the question right on the Instapundit front page. But Friedersdorf can’t be bothered to look for things like that. (Or, apparently, to distinguish properly between “knew” and “new.”) He’s got a point to make here. Which is, I think, trolling for his Tucker Carlson’s new venture, which launches Monday. Good luck with that, Conor. I understand you’re planning to distinguish yourself by featuring carefully researched, non-sloppy pieces. . . . .

Meanwhile, as I noted earlier, InstaPundit is for serious blog readers. The rest will have to keep up as best they can. Or not . . .

UPDATE: Actually, rereading this piece where Friedersdorf praises “the talented Tucker Carlson” while slagging Breitbart, et al., it’s not entirely clear to me if Friedersdorf is actually working for them or not. It sure sounds like it, and I’d heard that from somebody, but maybe not. Still, the Sitemeter counter’s right here on the page . . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Shawn Church writes:

Noting that I’d never even heard of Friedersdorf prior to your posting, you did pique my curiosity enough that I went and read his, well, critique I guess.

Personally, I felt as though he completely missed the point of Instapundit. I’ve never come to your site to be told what to think, or even to be told what _you_ think. Rather, you do a great job in aggregating a great deal of information that I use to help me form my own opinions on a variety of issues. As an infophile, you make my life _easier_. I don’t always agree with your positions (when you express them – I wonder if Friedersdorf bothered to count the number of posts you make which are simply a link and a title? I like that “read it and make up your own mind” approach).

Is there a selection bias for the links you choose to post? Well of course, there has to be such a bias by definition. But since many of your interests (either expressed or implied by your link choices) coincide with mine, that selection bias is _useful_ to me. And you throw enough stuff out there that I might not normally read, or might disagree with strongly, that it helps keep me on my toes.

You’re not the only blog I look to regularly, not even the only aggregator, but the utility of your contribution is huge.

Thanks! In an age where Twitter is prized, it’s funny to be slagged for excessive pithiness. But if Conor’s disappointed with InstaPundit, there are plenty of other blogs out there. Unlike a TV station, or a local newspaper, I don”t occupy a limited niche with little room for alternatives. One criticism he didn’t make, but that I think is fair, is that I’ve gotten into a bit of a rut on my blog rounds. I’ve been trying to do better lately, so if you’ve got stuff, especially from smaller blogs I haven’t linked lately, that you think is worth my attention, then please send it along.

And I appreciate the kind things Conor said, too. But, you know, it’s a one-man blog — I don’t have ghostbloggers like Andrew Sullivan — and it’s going to reflect my prejudices, interests, tiredness, crankiness, and enthusiasm as things happen. That’s how it is around here.

And reader Gerry LaMontagne writes: “Is it ironic that Friedersdorf takes about 1500 words to talk about ‘pithiness?’ Or is that just me?” Heh.

MORE: Jim Treacher writes:

Conor Friedersdorf is not working for the Daily Caller. I am, though! Check me out starting in about 11 hours or so.

http://dctrawler.dailycaller.com/

P.S. Could you maybe put up a correction that Friedersdorf has nothing to do with the Caller, and we’re no more fond of his attempts to divide and conquer than you are?

For a fellow pithiness-devotee, of course!

FINALLY: Pithiness is hard!

KENNETH ANDERSON: More Predator Drone Debate, in the Wall Street Journal, and What the Obama Administration Should Do as a Public Legal Position.

FINALLY REVEALED: The Exodus Emails.

WE’VE BEEN COLONIZED: 8 Percent of Human Genome Was Inserted By Virus, and May Cause Schizophrenia.

HOPE: Schwarzenegger says health care bill a ‘rip-off’. “California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger says concessions made to Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson to win his vote on the health care overhaul bill were a ‘rip-off’ for his state and is urging California lawmakers to vote against it.”

GAME CHANGER:

The relationship between Barack Obama and Joe Biden grew so strained during the 2008 campaign, according to a new book, that the two rarely spoke and aides not only kept Biden off internal conference calls but refused to even tell him they existed…

[W]hen Biden, at an October fund-raiser in Seattle, famously predicted that Obama would be tested with an international crisis, the then-Illinois senator had had enough.

‘How many times is Biden gonna say something stupid?’ he demanded of his advisers on a conference call, a moment at which most people on the call said the candidate was as angry as they had ever heard him…

Speaking to his own staff, Biden insisted that it hadn’t really been a gaffe. And feeling a bit defensive, he invoked one of the worst memories of Obama’s primary campaign.

‘I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t say anything about bitter people who cling to their guns and religion,’ Biden cracked, the authors paraphrase.

Okay, now analyze the body language in this picture.

MORE REPORTING FROM Scott Brown headquarters, by Prof. William Jacobson.

WHAT BARACK OBAMA said about Trent Lott. Yeah, but Lott was a Republican. Reid is a Democrat.

SALENA ZITO: Dems’ 2010 Strategy To Win.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: How to stop a vampire epidemic.

MASS. CONFUSION: Mass Confusion: Brown Up a Point in One Poll, Coakley Up 15 in Another. With barely more than a week to go, it hardly matters: It should be pedal-to-the-metal either way.

SOME “AMAZING RETRO-PULP ART,” plus a cool steampunk ray-gun.

MORE ON THE NEWARK DEBACLE:

Shutting down the airport, wasting thousands of people’s time by pointlessly rescreening them, treating them as animals in pens without food or drink or bathroom breaks for hours on end, causing them to miss their flights and screwing up their lives… none of that is Mr Jiang’s fault but that of the money-no-object TSA that imposes stupid petty rules on everybody else but doesn’t even follow its own. And that’s why Senator Lautenberg’s anger is misdirected: It’s not Mr Jiang’s fault that Newark’s “security” is a laughingstock.

Indeed.